인간중심주의적 동물윤리의 가능성에 관한 소론

Abstract

The aim of this essay is to fairly clarify the limit and the significance of the recently much-criticized anthropocentric way of thinking from the perspective of animal ethics. Today, many people tend to identify the anthropocentrism as the ideological origin of the environmental and ecological crisis all over the world. But this tendency is thought to have grown by virtue of a well-worn conceptual framework that stereotypes the anthropocentrism biasedly. And the anthropocentrism, framed by it, is often defined as a haughty world view that justifies the human domination and exploitation of nature on the basis of the blind belief that humans are more superior to any other natural beings. But I have come to map out this essay, motivated by the idea that the right way is not the sensational substitution of ‘biocentrism’ or ‘ecocentrism’ for anthropocentrism, but the moral self-enlightenment of anthropocentrism, that is, the substitution of the more moderate and broad-minded anthropocentrism for the old-fashioned tyrannical human chauvinism. In this essay, I mean to explore the possibility of an ‘anthropocentric animal ethics’ in order to embody such an idea in the animal ethics. This exploration will be performed toward advocating the so-called ‘expansive anthropocentrism’ that doesn’t regard the membership in our species, Homo sapiens, as the only admission ticket to our moral community. And its outline will be given in my distinction between the ‘narrow-minded anthropocentrism’ and the ‘expansive anthropocentrism.’ The former gives only ourselves, that is, humans the admission tickets to our moral community. But the latter is an ethical perspective that widens the scope of our moral community through demanding us to sympathize with the animal behaviors similar to ours. So it suggests that the sources of such a sympathy can be found in such natural characteristics as ‘rationality’ and ‘sentience’ that animals and humans have in common partly. I will argue that this expansive sort of anthropocentrism is more serious and responsible ethical position than some philosophers’ specific egalitarian claim.